A CPU equivalent to a P4 could run games today with a 670, and probably max a lot of them out.

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No. Games still do require CPU power, and modern games definitely would be limited by a P4 equivalent. This would create the exact situation you are talking about, a bottleneck, where upgrading the video card doesn't help at all because the CPU is the limiting factor.

No. Games still do require CPU power, and modern games definitely would be limited by a P4 equivalent. This would create the exact situation you are talking about, a bottleneck, where upgrading the video card doesn't help at all because the CPU is the limiting factor.

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You are trying to tell me a P4 with a 680 will not perform any better than a P4 with a 660?

I think you are focusing on the wrong part of what I said. I am not saying the P4 is relevant, forget about the P4 altogether. I am saying that there is no bottleneck, only scaling with a processor. The faster the processor the better of course.

You are trying to tell me a P4 with a 680 will not perform any better than a P4 with a 660?

I think you are focusing on the wrong part of what I said. I am not saying the P4 is relevant, forget about the P4 altogether. I am saying that there is no bottleneck, only scaling with a processor. The faster the processor the better of course.

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Yes, I'm telling you, that at a certain point you will see no performance boost going from a 670 to a 680 if the CPU is holding you back that much.

The 680 might allow you to run a higher resolution, or turn on some more eye candy, but if you leave the settings the same, at some point the CPU will become the limiting factor and increasing the GPU power will not give any performance gains.

Now most modern games are GPU bound on any reasonable settings, so the CPU makes little difference as long as you have a modern CPU, but there are definitely some games out there still that rely heavily on the CPU. If the CPU can only do enough calculations to run the game at 20FPS, then the game is going to run at 20FPS, it doesn't matter if you have a 650 or dual-680s, the game will still run at 20FPS.

Any point where the GPU has to wait on the CPU is a bottleneck, and yes it does happen.

Now most modern games are GPU bound on any reasonable settings, so the CPU makes little difference as long as you have a modern CPU, but there are definitely some games out there still that rely heavily on the CPU

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My second machine has an E8400 on P35, slow DDR2 RAM and 720p res. BF3 multiplayer is unplayable with a GTX560SE. GPU load is around 30% jumping all the time up and down. If I tone down the settings it's the same. That is just one example. ACIII is another example where regardless of the settings there are low framerates that come with low GPU load.
Of course 80% of the games run well but lately many titles require a strong CPU (3220 is in that category as gaming is concerned)

My second machine has an E8400 on P35, slow DDR2 RAM and 720p res. BF3 multiplayer is unplayable with a GTX560SE. GPU load is around 30% jumping all the time up and down. If I tone down the settings it's the same. That is just one example. ACIII is another example where regardless of the settings there are low framerates that come with low GPU load.
Of course 80% of the games run well but lately many titles require a strong CPU (3220 is in that category as gaming is concerned)

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Exactly, even Skyrim@720 is CPU limited with anything better than a GTX660. Going from a 660Ti to a 680 gives absolutely no performance boost. Hard Reset and Starcraft II are two more examples.

It would but it also depends on the games that you play. I've been rocking with i5 760 at 4GHz and a GTX 660Ti for a while now but recently had to switch to a i3 2100 because of a motherboard failure. In Battlefield 3 I could no longer run Ultra settings because the FPS would sometimes drop to "unacceptable" framerates. Also I did play Crysis 3 alpha at medium on the i3 and then high on the i5 to get framerates I wanted. Also in DayZ (ArmaII mod) l had an issue with lag in cities but that also cleared when I switched back to my i5. So these are my experiences with the i3 2100. It might not be the i3 3220 so take the information with a grain of salt.